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Rio 2 Movie Review

Rio 2 is a 2014 animated musical comedy film directed by Carlos Saldanha and starring Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway. It’s a very mediocre sequel.

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“We’ll attack at the midnight hour.

Because it’s more evil“

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I actually really enjoyed the first ‘Rio’ movie that was one of the better films from Blue Sky Studios. It was fun, colorful and charming. This sequel, however, is for the most part quite subpar, though the colorful animation is still in full swing here. The plot is just very weak.

While it was a great choice to include more of the rainforest into the storyline, the end result felt clichéd, boring and too silly as well. The characters that returned felt shoehorned into the plot with Nigel being a particular waste. I loved this villain in the original, but here he was badly used and much less memorable and/or threatening than he’s been before.

Blue Sky was a studio that really stumbled in the sequel department. The Ice Age movies got progressively worse with each and every installment, and with Rio, the same is the case unfortunately. I don’t know what will happen to this franchise in the future now that the studio shut down, but they need to bring back the fun of the first movie for sure.

Here, nothing was all that fun. While the musical numbers before had a lot of oomph and energy to them, in this sequel they are forgettable and even annoying depending on your palatability of modern song renditions in animated flicks. Original songs were sorely lacking in this one.

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Rio 2 also forgot to use Blu and Jewel more, both are rather pedestrian and uninspired here, which was a shame. Gabi was a ridiculous addition as this poison dart frog in love with a bird, but other new additions mostly fell flat. The rainforest was solidly utilized into the plot, but once again the ecological themes are nowhere to be found, which was really the nail in the coffin for this entire franchise as it’s thus not only unsophisticated for adults, but also not a great message learner for kids.

Rio 2 is still pleasingly colorful and it has some fun and silly moments for sure, but for the most part this was a widely inferior sequel to the solid original that features way too many annoying modern song renditions, weak characterization and a pedestrian plot. A lack of a bigger ecological message was once again problematic.

My Rating – 2.5